The Scholar Teaches Class.....

Last week, Walden and Staudenmaier were discussing
a message of mine to this list on PLANS' list, in a thread entitled
"talking about us:

Re: talking about us
Peter Staudenmaier
Dec 07, 2003 11:06 PST

Hi again Walden, you wrote
in your other posts:

"Why would Tarjei say
something that is factually incorrect? I have been reading this
list for a couple of years now and I have not heard Peter always
insist that anthroposophy is a fascist right wing ideology. Nor
have I heard anthroposophists characterized as such. The anthroposophists
I know personally are definitely NOT right of centre."

I think the problem here is
mixing up specifc statements with general statements. When I
write that many German, Swiss, and Austrian anthroposophists
in the 1920's and 1930's shared a number of right-wing beliefs,
some latter-day anthroposophists think I am saying that all anthroposophists
everywhere and at all times have been rightwingers. While there
are certainly right-wing anthroposophists today, including a
number of neo-fascist anthroposophists (mostly followers of Werner
Haverbeck, the most important post-war far-right anthroposophist),
it appears that most contemporary anthroposophists in the contexts
that I know well, including Germany and the United States, are
more or less liberal or left-leaning.

Staudenmaier is subtle. I did some checking,
including the exchanges I had with him on the WC in June-August
2001, and he has not spelled out that anthroposophists are generally
right wingers. I did confront him with statistics in 2001, however,
showing that the voting record among Norwegian anthroposophists
is overwhelmingly left wing. To the best of my recollection,
Peter Staudenmaier and Peter Zegers disputed this on the ground
that they did not have access to verification, and Peter S. argued
against the relevance of statistics.

But there are obviously anthroposophical fascists
and right wingers. I was recently confronted with this on Starman's
list, where I was even denied freedom of speech because politics
is declared off-topic. But Starman and some of his sidekicks
did express some disturbingly hawkish views and made it clear
that liberal and left wing are dirty words. And Starman's major
argument to make aggressive militarism compatible with anthroposophy
is extremely foggy: He argues that because Steiner endorsed the
Baghavad Gita (which is supposedly pro-Pentagon?), he must have
favored war. (I wonder what Gandhi would have made of this bullshit.)

Peter Staudenmaier openly claims to be a historian:

"I experience this a lot, especially
with other historians."

Someone ought to call this pompous bluff of
his. No historian practices libellous propaganda with an agenda
to destroy a movement. And where are the history books he has
written?

Staudenmaier ponders:

I stumbled on something today
which lit a light bulb here at Walden Pond. This one sentence
by Tarjei from his web site (who is monitoring this list) might
well be the missing link I so very much wanted to find. Here's
the deal: One person views history as, well... history in the
mainstream sense
-
while the other views it as occultism. Tarjei, from his site:

"...I told Peter Staudenmaier
that the roots of anthroposophy are to be found in the spiritual
world, and that in order to understand this properly, an occult
conception of historical events must be taken into consideration."

Yes, that is one of several
factors that make it virtually impossible for anthroposophists
who share this view to understand what I write about their movement.

On the contrary: This is one of several factors
that make it so much easiere for anthroposophists to recognize
the utter falsehood of Staudenmaier's outrageous allegations.
The history of ideas must be seen in the light of ideas, and
spiritual impulses must be viewed in the context of spiritual
influences. If such ideas and influences are assumed to be illusions
arising from chemical processes in the brain, hallucinations
and the like, and spiritual history is nothing but anthro-babble
and gibberish, a charletan playing "historian" will
be staring at an empty void.

Staudenmaier continues:

"There is no such thing
as "an occult conception of historical events", and
even if there were, historians would be obligated to disregard
it as
incompatible with scholarly methods."

No wonder Staudenmaier was so ill at ease
about me having read Goodrick-Clarke and Webb when researching
my 1996 article about Nazi-occultism that he claimed later (long
after I had unsubscribed from the WC for the last time) that
I was lying about having read Goodrick-Clarke! This is what I
commented on my website at http://www.uncletaz.com/peterbull.html
which Peter S. is referring to. My original WC post about the
occult history of anthroposophy can be picked up at http://www.uncletaz.com/aproots.html

And here comes a beauty from Peter S:

"I take it then, that
facts, dates, etc. are of little importance when history is studied
with an "occult conception of historical events.""

Facts and dates are of utmost importance in
occult history, but the spiritual events behind such external
phenomena are added. This shows where Staudenmaier's homework
needs some improvement.

"The worst readers are
those who proceed like plundering soldiers: they pick up a few
things they use, soil and confuse the rest, and blaspheme the
whole." - Friedrich Nietzsche, Mixed
Opinions and Maxims